Word: heaths
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...vividly remember the three-week dock strike of 1970, stocked up on meat, fresh fruits and vegetables. Cattle feed-lot operators worried that Britain had only a two-week supply of animal feed. Angry dock leaders predicted an "indefinite" strike, and it seemed possible that Prime Minister Edward Heath would have to call out troops to deal with what the Queen's order said was a threat to "deprive the community of the essentials of life." Subject to Parliament's approval this week, the declaration of a state of emergency will allow the government to requisition transport, control...
...Heath's hopes-and British labor's ire-focus on the sweeping Industrial Relations Act, which Heath's Tory majority pushed through Parliament last August. The act is the first serious attempt in 66 years to reform British union-management relations; among other things, it established a special Industrial Relations Court empowered to rule on labor disputes. But rightly or wrongly, many British workingmen regard the new court as a basically anti-labor "political court...
None are more convinced of that than Britain's 42,000 dock workers, who have won a deserved reputation for toughness and truculence. In 1970 they greeted Heath's upset election with demands for an 80% basic wage increase -and shut the ports down for three costly weeks when the Tories refused to ante up. This time the dockers, hard pressed by the introduction of containerized cargo and other improvements, were fighting for jobs...
...Commons, Heath firmly stood by the Industrial Relations Act. Some Laborites tried to canonize the Pentonville Five by comparing them to the Tolpuddle Martyrs-six laborers who were sent to a penal colony in 1834 for organizing a trade union. Labor Party Chief Harold Wilson, who led the attack on Heath in Commons, scourged Tory labor policy as "inept and malevolent." He ignored the fact that as Prime Minister in 1969 he had not only pressed unsuccessfully for similar reforms but also called them "essential...
...explained that he wanted to skip a formal trip to the Eternal City in order to avoid the folderol-state dinners, motorcades, military honors, perhaps a papal audience-that would get in the way of the "working visit" he envisioned. Instead, he suggested something "like my meeting with Mr. Heath at Chequers," the country estate where he had met informally with the British Prime Minister last March...